The Once and Future Champ: Windows XP

Well, here's yet another reason not to be excited by Windows Vista. According
to benchmark testing conducted by researchers at the Florida-based Devil Mountain
Software, Windows XP with beta service pack 3 has twice
the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited service pack 1. Yikes.

Tested both with and without SP1, Vista was considerably slower than XP with
SP3, taking a little over 80 seconds to complete the test (compared to 35 seconds
for XP/SP3). According to company officials, Vista's performance with SP1 improved
less than 2 percent, compared to its performance without SP1. XP's performance
with SP3 increased 10 percent. The test was conducted using a Dell XPS M1710
test bed with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of memory, and put Office
2007 through a series of productivity tasks including the creation of a compound
document.

If SP1 fails to stimulate more interest in Vista among corporate users than
what Microsoft has been able to muster so far, it could prove to be a significant
setback for the product. Typically, corporate users wait for the first service
pack of a Microsoft operating system to arrive before getting serious about
evaluating it for deployment. XP has proved to be so in-demand that Microsoft
has already extended the deadline for PC makers to make XP available on new
systems from Jan. 31 to June 30. And, with talk swirling that Microsoft will
sun set support for XP some time in early 2009, many IT shops are soon going
to face a tough decision about whether to stay with XP or migrate to an operating
system that will cost them more money and that they have little enthusiasm for.